Here’s a Caliber Press article about a recent 9th Circuit decision involving the shooting of a suicidal subject armed with a knife who was 55ft away from Officers when he was shot.
https://www.calibrepress.com/2019/09...bd79-176940745
Here’s the most mind boggling thing from the article:
Why on earth would you actually have that written into your policy? “Totality of circumstances”, anyone?The dissenting appellate judge challenged his colleagues’ conclusion that the attacker posed an “immediate” threat warranting deadly force at a distance of 55 feet. By its written policy at that time, he pointed out, the officers’ department “provides that a person armed with a dangerous weapon, such as a knife or bat, constitutes a danger to the safety of [an] officer when that person is at a distance of 21 feet or less from the officer.
“Thus, under the Department’s own 21-foot rule,” the subject “at a distance of 55 feet presumptively did not pose an immediate threat” when he was shot, the dissenter argued. “The point of the rule is surely to guide officers’ conduct as to whether and when a suspect poses a threat…. [O]fficers are trained based on the policy, and the reasonable inference is that this training should affect our assessment of what a reasonable officer would believe and how he should react.”
Wisely, they have since removed it.